By Ta’Leah Van Sistine, Community Reporter
Plans are underway to expand UW-Eau Claire’s newly renamed Menard Center for Constitutional Studies, following the news of the Menard family’s $3 million donation in September.
Located on the fourth floor of Hibbard Humanities Hall, the Center was established in 2016 as a joint effort by Political Science faculty members Eric Kasper, Michael Fine and Peter Myers and Jason Spraitz, an associate professor in the department’s Criminal Justice program.
According to the Center’s webpage, it is a non-partisan organization that promotes research, education and community outreach on “matters related to the Wisconsin Constitution and the United States Constitution.”
Center focuses on hiring for new positions
Kasper, the Center’s director, said in a recent interview that, as soon as the Menard family’s gift was received, Political Science faculty moved forward on their first task of hiring individuals for four university positions funded through the donation.
Two of the hires will be for new faculty positions that, hopefully, will be filled for the Fall 2021 semester, Kasper said.
The two positions include an assistant professorship in the Political Science department and an assistant professorship in its Criminal Justice program.
“The idea here from the Criminal Justice side is that they’re looking for, in particular, someone who will be able to teach courses and conduct research in the area of criminal justice reform,” Kasper said.
Kasper said once the faculty hiring process is further along, there will also be two new coordinator positions offered.
One coordinator will work in the Center to help facilitate its events and programming. The other coordinator will work in the Political Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that connects local governments, non-profit organizations and other groups to experts in political science and law.
Kasper said the Institute’s coordinator will help facilitate research surrounding “the Civil Liberties Scorecard,” a report that will be produced from national survey research gauging how much Americans know about their civil liberties.
This research project is also funded by the Menard family’s gift. Kasper said although the Center and Institute are separate entities, the two organizations will be working together.
Donation will allow Center to grow
Kasper said the Center has always had support from Prof. Geoff Peterson, Political Science department chair, and from the UW-EC administration. That support allowed the Center to be established and to hold annual Constitution Day events.
In a typical semester, Kasper said the Center hosts multiple speakers, panels and book studies. But faculty involved with the Center have been limited in terms of setting up events and programs because it hasn’t had a source of funding that would allow it “to really grow,” he added.
Rachel Van Dyke, a comprehensive political science student, said she has been involved with the Center through a book group with Kasper and other students, reading the book Free Speech on Campus by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman.
Van Dyke said she has taken every single Constitution course the university offers right now, so when she heard about the Menard family’s donation to the Center, she was happy, thinking about the students who will get to learn even more than she did.
“The center was started in 2016, so the fact that it’s already expanding … I’m really excited for it,” Van Dyke said.
Looking ahead
The additional faculty members will also allow the Political Science department to offer more courses, Kasper said.
“We’ll be looking at offering new courses that would revolve around constitutional questions,” Kasper said, “and we’ll be trying to offer something particularly on the freedom of expression.”
In terms of events, Kasper said the Center has hosted two virtual discussions this semester, since the announcement of the Menard family’s gift. Kasper said the Center won’t be doing any more virtual events this year because it’s important to ensure events have a good turnout if speakers are being paid to appear at them.
“Especially getting into 2021,” Kasper said, “if we’re going to be doing virtual events for awhile, (we need) to make sure that when we’re bringing in outside speakers, that we’re doing so in a way that makes sense.”
There are also plans to offer workshops for undergraduate students starting in the Spring 2021 semester, and to offer middle and high school teacher training as well as high school student workshops in the summer of 2021.
Details remain uncertain
But Kasper said the details surrounding these plans are still uncertain because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of these events were originally planned to be in person, but they may need to transition to an online format or be rescheduled for a different time in the future.
Kasper said he believes the Center will ultimately be a great benefit to students because they will have more events and programming they can participate in, as well as student-faculty collaborative research and several scholarships they can pursue.
“It’s a real opportunity for the Center and for the university to become one of the primary places both regionally, as well as perhaps even nationally, where a focus on studying the Constitution is done,” Kasper said.
Note: the home page photo was taken by Ta’Leah Van Sistine.
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Joyce Anderson says
I have more questions than comments. Will the hiring of professors meet the standard UWEC hiring practices and will it live up to the university’s stated desire to be inclusive and provide instructors from minority populations? I am finding more and more how vital it is to hear from people whose life experiences are different than mine or collectively “our” experiences, here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Finally, why do I feel uneasy about this project?